August 26, 2009: Mack McCray's piano recital

Piano Month in the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral concluded today with a recital by Mack McCray, Chairman of the Piano Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  While there is little evidence that McCray was directly influenced by Vladimir Horowitz, the program he prepared would probably invoke the Horowitz spirit among most rabid fans of piano recitals and recordings.  Much of that spirit could be attributed to the sense of virtuosity in the composers McCray selected:  Domenico Scarlatti (the E major Longo 23 sonata being a Horowitz favorite), Joseph Haydn, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Ignacy Paderewski, and Alexander Siloti.  Some of it also had to do with paraphrase offerings from two of the composers, Liszt and Siloti.  Whatever the influences of that spirit may have been, however, McCray has very much his own performing style, applied to present not only the virtuoso fireworks but also the music embellished by those fireworks.

The substance of the music itself was most evident in the early Haydn G major Hoboken XVI/6 sonata, which probably predates his arrival at Eszterháza.  All of his imaginative embellishments are deployed in the service of rich harmonic invention, giving us the first tastes of that Haydn style that keeps us guessing what will happen next, no matter how familiar we may be with his music.  For all the paths down which Haydn chose to lead us, McCray always made the way clear, allowing us to enjoy both the paths themselves and Haydn's "side trips" of embellishment.

The more adventurous of the paraphrases was Siloti's treatment of the E minor prelude from the first volume of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.  The adventure begins with Siloti composing his transcription in B minor and continues as he adds his own original third voice to what was basically an accompanied two-part invention.  He also excises the concluding Presto, maintaining the moody quality of the beginning for the entirety of the paraphrase.  McCray offered a skillful performance through which we could appreciate Siloti's creativity while maintaining a clear sense of the source material upon which he exercised that creativity.  By all rights, his approach should be regarded as a standard to be honored in the performance of both "straight" transcriptions and the more adventurous paraphrases.

Last week I wrote about how Chia-Lin Yang programmed her own encore for her Noontime Concerts™ Piano Month recital.  McCray did the same by concluding his recital with Liszt's "Grand Galop Chromatique."  For me there are certain Liszt compositions that carry virtuosity to such excesses that my only reaction can be a fit of the giggles.  As far as I am concerned, "Totentanz" only succeeds when it induces such a fit, while my wife has a similar reaction to his treatment of Ludwig van Beethoven's incidental music for The Ruins of Athens.  The "Grand Galop Chromatique" is definitely in the "Totentanz" league and manages to pack its punch in a much shorter duration.  The spirit that McCray brought to his performance was entirely appropriate and seems to have reflected his own ability to see the humor in this sort of excess.